Backend Engineer — Scalable Music Data & APIs

Socket.dev; Los Angeles (CA); On-site; USD 145,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Genius in Los Angeles is seeking an in-person Backend Engineer to help build the ultimate music companion. You’ll design pipelines, databases, and APIs powering Genius.com, public API insights, and partner data exchanges for millions of users daily.

You will optimize backend stability, performance, and scalability, own systems end-to-end, and collaborate with product owners and engineers. This role requires onsite work at Beverly Hills office 3–4 days a week.

Qualifications

• Experience with Ruby on Rails or a similar framework and building APIs at scale.
• Deep proficiency with relational and non-relational databases for OLTP/OLAP.
• Hands-on ELT pipelines and workflow orchestration with Airflow.
• Product-first mindset, driving projects from ideation to launch.
• Collaborates cross-functionally with frontend, data, product, and engineers.
• 4+ years in backend or data engineering in a product-driven environment.
• CS degree or equivalent hands-on experience is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain pipelines to process, transform, and deliver music data to partners and internal systems.
• Identify and fix infrastructure bottlenecks to scale backend services.
• Architect database query patterns in PostgreSQL, ClickHouse and BigQuery.
• Design and implement backend APIs to serve data reliably and performantly.
• Take ownership of systems, improving performance, reliability and maintainability.
• On-call rotation to triage issues and keep services online.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to address business needs.

Skills

Ruby on Rails

APIs at scale

Cross-functional collaboration

Data pipeline development

Performance optimization

On-call reliability

Product ownership

Bachelor's degree in CS (or equivalent

Education

B.S. in Computer Science or related field

Tools

PostgreSQL

ClickHouse

BigQuery

Apache Airflow

Job description

Genius in Los Angeles is seeking an in-person Backend Engineer to help build the ultimate music companion. You’ll design pipelines, databases, and APIs powering Genius.com, public API insights, and partner data exchanges for millions of users daily.

You will optimize backend stability, performance, and scalability, own systems end-to-end, and collaborate with product owners and engineers. This role requires onsite work at Beverly Hills office 3–4 days a week.